How to Encourage Your Employees to be More Confident
Posted October 20th, 2018
We all know confidence is important. Not only does it help create an air of authority around the task, it can also help encourage employees to work towards their goals, improving job satisfaction and cultivating a sense of loyalty.
Providing proper support to you employees, presented in the right way, can have an immediate impact on employee confidence…an impact that will grow with time.
How do you encourage confidence? By promoting a sense of safety and security in these key areas:
- Opportunity
- Growth
- Information
- Environment
- Performance
Opportunity
Providing employees opportunities to increase their experience in the field can build confidence in the knowledge they possess as well as the skills they develop. Introducing new skills in the workplace can give them a chance to learn through doing. Many employees appreciate hands-on learning experience as successfully completing a task, even with assistance, can lead to improvements in their confidence level.
Growth
If opportunities covers learning, what can growth relate to? Growth is the ability to develop through helpful and constructive feedback, delivered at the right time. It can go hand-in-hand with opportunity, as the best moment to offer guidance is as an issue is occurring. Timely feedback allows an employee to make incremental changes as they are needed instead of being overwhelmed by a laundry list of corrections during a formal review.
Performance
Similar to growth is confidence in their overall performance. While noticing opportunities to correct employee’s actions may be easy, it is important to find opportunities for praise. Praise allows employees to feel confident in their actions as it provides guidance about what they are doing right. If an employee knows you were supportive of their action, they will feel more confident should the same situation arise again.
This is another area where immediate feedback is best as the action is fresh in their mind, making it easier to connect the action with the praise.
Information
If you create a workplace where questions are encouraged, and received with respect and concern, your employees will feel more comfortable with the information they are being provided. While you may understand the background of certain business decisions, your employees may not have access to that information. By allowing them to ask questions, they can gain an increased level of understanding, leading to a higher level of confidence through open discussion.
Environment
A safe environment is about more than feeling comfortable than intrinsic comforts. It includes the physical safety of their person and those around them. An unsafe work environment can increase the overall level of anxiety, resulting in lower confidence in the execution of their daily activities. Promoting safety improves the wellbeing of all of the employees within the workplace, and should never be placed on the back burner.
Here at Bayside Solutions, we are confident in our ability to find the right employees to me your needs. Contact us today to see how we can make you feel more confident in your hiring choices.
